simple search api (was Re: mimetype standardisation by testsets)

[Joe Shaw]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 19:11 +0100, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> I think I see where the disagreement comes from. Currently the premise
> for the simple search api has been that it didn't need any language
> bindings. Applications would certainly wrap the interface in a native
> object allowing for mainloop integration, but it didn't need any code
> from the Wasabi project to work. 

This is somewhat contrary to the idea behind D-Bus, however.  The entire
idea behind D-Bus is that the low-level libdbus APIs are used by
bindings to integrate with the higher level platform.  Application
developers operate in their language/environment of their choice.  The
API design should keep this principle in mind.

> I still think it is possible to write a responsive ui with with the
> paging queries instead of the fully async ones. An application need
> not request 1000 hits at a time it could send 10 queries requesting
> the hit ranges n*100 to (n+1)*100 for n=0..9. An example of this is
> the Tracker search tool and the Tracker deskbar plugin (actually they
> only perform one query, but still). 

I'm not so concerned about the overhead in doing the queries themselves,
although it could become somewhat prohibitive if you're querying massive
amounts of data.  What I'm more worried about is that this is a remote
procedure call to another application.  There's no guarantee that the
server will ever return, let alone in a timely matter.  Your application
might be doing the right thing with paging, but another application may
be hammering or even DoSing the search service.

Joe